Fritz Geißler

Who was Fritz Geißler?

Fritz Geißler was one of the most important composers of the German Democratic Republic.

The son of Elsa and Walther Geißler, he was raised in modest circumstances. His first violin lessons came from the leader of a local tenants' association's mandolin-band, himself a pipe-fitter. Following graduation from public school, Geissler went into training with the town-pipers band of Naunhof. After the conclusion of this most inauspicious education he earned the means to continue private lessons in violin, piano, and music theory as a bar and coffee house fiddler in Leipzig. Later, in 1979, he used his experiences from this time in his opera Die Stadtpfeifer.

In 1940 he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a musician, and ordered to Guernsey in 1942, where he served in the Luftwaffe's musical corps. In 1945 he became a prisoner of war of the English, where he was offered the opportunity to play second violin in a string quartet, and to compose or arrange choral settings for the prison choir. After his release in 1948 he studied composition and viola at the music college in Leipzig under Max Dehnert, Arnold Matz and Wilhelm Weismann.